And Then Things Fall Apart Read Online Free PDF Page A

Matt, how he would have liked to have seen this too, how I would have liked to have seenit with him. It’s not like I’m going to Netflix educational DVDs about the birthing process to watch while eating popcorn and microwaved bean burritos, but I thought about birth and birthing and babies and the freaking meaning of life for almost a month straight. Matt tried to understand, but really, he didn’t see the video, did he? He had no idea what I was talking about.
    Esther’s boyfriend, Buddy (his real name!), shows her (a) an actual woman giving birth and (b) a bunch of fetuses in jars of formaldehyde. Which, I think, is why my brain went there in the first place. When it comes to the baby-having, I don’t really think about it much. As it pertains to me. I mean, I’m fifteen. Babies are something I assume I will have one day, like my driver’s license, a college degree from a decent school, my own apartment in the city. Marriage is for the birds, from what I’ve seen of it. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but thanks to Marriage with a capital
M
, I’m all kinds of sad today. Marriage seems to suck, but babies are all right. Kids are even better. I was a flower girl at my aunt’s wedding, and now her baby is on infant life support.
    In movies when there is a dog, I always kind of brace myself for the moment when the dog will eat poison, get shot, get run over, drown, etc. And then when the dog dies (they always do; that is their function in the film, to die), I weep and basically lose my mind over it. And that is formake-believe dogs on the silver screen. How must it feel to lose an actual baby?
    Baby birds, when they fall out of their nests in the spring, are bluish with skinny necks and translucent eyelashes. What is life, anyway? Is the baby aware of what’s going on? How dire the situation is? Is it in pain? What could it possibly be thinking of? Is it just mute and senseless, waiting for people to touch it, writhing under Plexiglas? That’s its life? This baby and I share so much DNA that if it needed a kidney, we would probably be a perfect match, being cousins and all.
    These musings were all—what’s the word?—
academic
before I watched the stupid Pampers, Downy, and Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo commercials. Oh, daytime TV. I mean, it was so very sad when Old Yeller died. But he wasn’t
actually
my dog. And it was also sad about the early birth, but it was hard to think of the baby as
actually
my cousin. But then I was lying here, scratching and not really paying attention, until there was the most amazing parade of adorableness that American advertising has to offer. Babies—what seemed like hundreds of them—sleeping, cooing, dimpling, making cute baby food messes. Learning how to walk. Being licked into hysterics by wiggling golden retriever puppies. Clapping their little chubby hands together, innocent and loving and alive with joy the way only babies can be.
    And our baby became flesh-and-blood real to me for the first time. Whatever they need to save you, a lung, a chunkof my liver, my pancreas—take it all. I don’t need it as badly as you do. I’m so tired of being the only child in my family, my limbs ache from it. She deserves the chance to be bowled over by a puppy. This baby is all potential. I love her sofa king much already. Whether she makes it or not.
    I want to be able to look back on this time of my life and laugh or even just smirk a little. I want to look back like in a rearview mirror at this horrible bloody smash-up of a summer. I want to live through this and move on, and if my little cousin can just hang in there and stick around long enough to have a life, all this crap my family is going through will seem inconsequential. Why couldn’t this one baby, our little baby, splash out in textbook fashion like the one I saw in health class? Who decides what is fair? WTF?
    Although I can’t stop imagining my